The podcast you’re about to hear is the second of a series of shows recorded at the Georgian Partners Portfolio Conference last week in Toronto. My guest for this interview is Kenneth Conroy, VP of data science at Vancouver, Canada-based Finn.ai, a company building a chatbot system for banks.

Kenneth and I spoke about how Finn.AI built its core conversational platform. We also discuss in depth the requirements and challenges of conversational applications, and how and why they transitioned off of a commercial chatbot platform–in their case API.ai–and built their own custom platform based on deep learning, word2vec and other natural language understanding technologies.

Thanks to Our Sponsor

Georgian Partners is a venture capital firm whose investment thesis is that certain tech trends change every aspect of a software business over time including business models, product plans, people and skills, technology platforms, pricing, and packaging. Georgian invests in those companies best positioned to take advantage of these trends and then works closely with those companies to develop and execute the strategies necessary to make it happen. Applied AI is one of the trends they’re investing in, as are Conversational Business and Security First. Georgian sponsored this series and we thank them for their support. To learn more about Georgian visit twimlai.com/georgian, where you’ll also be able to download white papers on the principles of applied AI and conversational business.

Events Update

If you’re in New York City on October 30th and 31st, we hope you’ll join us at the NYU Future Labs AI Summit & Happy Hour. As you may remember, we attended the inaugural Summit back in April. The fall event features more great speakers, including Corinna Cortes, Head of Research at Google NY, Davide Venturelli, Science Operations Manager at NASA Ames Quantum AI Lab, and Dennis Mortensen, CEO & Founder of startup x.ai. For the event homepage visit aisummit2017.futurelabs.nyc, and for 25% off of tickets, use code TWIML25. For details on the happy hour visit our events page at twimlai.com/events.